Anoup Desai Lumped in with the Same Bunch as Tatiana Del Toro? Only on American Idol

An overview of the American Idol’s judges picks for the wildcard round.

See more at http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/1535975/anoup_desai_lumped_in_with_the_same.html

Is Paula Abdul Leaving American Idol Because of Kara DioGuardi

Comments overhead earlier this week in Hollywood suggest that Paula is not digging new Judge DioGuardi and may be entertaining other career options for the future.

See more at http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/1514789/is_paula_abdul_leaving_american_idol.html

American Idol Season 8′s Second Group of Hopefuls Fail to Dazzle Judges

Even an extra day of preparation wasn’t enough to lift the majority of Amrican Idol’s second group of 12 above mediocrity.

See more at http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/1514755/american_idol_season_8s_second_group.html

What Makes “The Breakfast Club” the Quintessential 80′s Movie?

What makes eighties movies so great? Find out and revisit John Hughes’s classic film which cemented the careers of Molly Ringwald, Ally Sheedy and others.

See more at http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/1504186/what_makes_the_breakfast_club_the_quintessential.html

American Idol Season 8 Off to a Rocky Start with Poor Performances by Early Favorites

The first live results show of this season’s Idol brought several surprises, and not all of them good. Does Season Eight’s group of hopefuls have what it takes to stack up to Idols past?

See more at http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/1497772/american_idol_season_8_off_to_a_rocky.html

The Big Dig

I’ve decided to save myself some hassle and make this blog my official fiction page. Rather than trying to build a page on my site www.therelrobertpalmer.com that looks exactly like this one, I figure why not use this one?

So from now on, keeps tabs on my fiction here. See what I’ve written, where it’s been published, what is to come . . .

. . . Starting with my novel!

Inspired by the Nanowrimo (www.nanowrimo.org/) I decided to write a novel back in November. While the Nanos write their novels in a month, I figured I’d take it easy on myself and take two. If I had stuck to my schedule, the book would have been written by next week but I didn’t.

It shames me to admit it but I’m a slacker when it comes to project with self-imposed deadlines. When I’m writing for a client, I get things done ASAP and turn drafts in before their deadlines most of the time but when it’s a project where I’m the only one counting on myself, I waste time with video games and “research.”

But I have written a novel before—50,000 words that I kept in a drawer for two months and then threw in the trash. This time, I am putting my declaration on the web, I’m telling my friends, I’m informing my family. I hope the added pressure will keep my nose to the grindstone.

So, here I go. Won’t you come along on the journey with me?

An interesting thing happened to me on the way to the mall to buy a girl robot . . .

I’ve been a big fan of robots and technology for as long as I can remember. I can still remember how cool it was when Asimov was unveiled for the first time and I always wanted a little robotic dog like Doctor Who’s K-9. That’s why I was almost saddened to see computer related technology overtake robotics in the public’s eye but I’ve found a nation that loves their robots as much as I do: Japan!
From robots that will cook and clean for you, to ones that will answer the doorbell and wipe your behind, the Japanese have long been the world’s leader in robotics. A recent string in developments in technology have made a robotic future much more plausible than it ever was before and have inspired a new generation of robo-geeks to build their own answers to all of the world’s problems, whether they be how to take care of the elderly to how to get a date!
Check out this interesting and humorous recap of three news stories from around the world that have helped reignite my passion for robots, girl robots, and being lazy!
http://www.associatedcontent.com/user/381750/robert_palmer.html

Bear with me. I just submitted the content and it takes about a week to be approved.

Electricity Dependence and Other Little-known Perils of Working Online

Like many people who work from home, I love the independence it gives me.  I’m free to make my own hours, work at my own pace, and charge what I feel is a fare rate for what I do.  Though I still hold a “traditional” job in order to keep my health benefits and retirement fund (though I seem to be losing more money than I’m making with that at the moment) I’m turning to my online work for an ever larger chunk of my income.

As great as working online is, it amazes me how easily a whole day, sometimes more, can be lost completely due to circumstances that I would have previously considered mere annoyances.  This is the story of the week of electronic and electrical plagues the crippled my attempts to become a famous copywriter.

Treating my desktop computer as the hub for all of my writing and related work, I rely primarily on my high-speed cable internet connection.  I’ve had the same provider for three years now and since they begrudgingly updated my modem and rewired the lines coming into my house, I’ve not had a single problem getting a clear, consistent, and reliable connection . . . until earlier this week.  For some unknown reason, my connection went down.  I lost my portal to the internet, my landline, and my Skype service in one fell swoop.

I was completely lost without my internet.  It was true that I could still do all of my writing, save the files, and upload them at later date but my mind was so distracted by that little error icon in bottom of my screen that I just couldn’t string any words together.  I just sat staring at my computer screen like it was a prison door, I knew the whole world was on the other side waiting for me but there was nothing I could do to get there.

When my service finally came back, it was like breathing fresh air after being trapped under the ocean for hours, getting a death row pardon from the governor at one minute to midnight, or feeling that first giddy tickle in the pit of your stomach as your spacecraft leaves Earth’s gravity.

That crisis averted life— and business—went back to normal . . . at least for a couple of days.
Later that week, with the weatherman predicting a big storm, complete with rain and wind of gusts up to 50 miles an hour, I settled in with a hot cup of coffee, wrapped in my bathrobe, and fired up my computer.  I had a busy day planned.  I needed to finish up a few projects, submit a few proposals, and correspond with former clients.  The weatherman hadn’t been right at all this fall so I really wasn’t worried, and even if he was we hadn’t lost power where I lived for at least two years.  My previous experience with the cable company should’ve been a foreshadowing of things to come, after all I’d read enough horror novels to know how it works.  However, when the storm came the wind was outrageous.  It rumpled my tin roof, blew trees down—which took down power lines—which left me in the dark once again, and promised to make for another wasted day.

I had just recently purchased a mini-notebook computer so I figured that all was not lost and I could still get some work done if I went to the local library.  They have Wi-Fi and it is right in town so it almost never loses power.  On the way I stopped in to see my wife at her job, just to say hi.  She said the power was out because a tree had come down in the front lawn of a coworker of hers and that the power company was there fixing the lines right now.  “We should have power now,” she said.  So I dug out my cell phone, dialed home, and was greeted by my own voice on the answering machine.  I didn’t really want to go to the library anyway.

I hopped in my car and went home only to discover that the power had gone out once again by the time I got home.  I sat around for an hour or two waiting for the power company, twiddling my thumbs and eating all of the junk food in sight, but when they didn’t show decided to go to the library once again.  I got to the library, plugged into the wall outlet, hooked up to the Wi-Fi and worked for 20 minutes before school let out in the library was inundated with noisy little children—some of which sat on the floor around me in a semicircle like I was the Buddha sitting under a fig tree and they were my disciples.  They made it hard to concentrate and I just couldn’t get any work done so I left for home once again.
Just as I stepped through the door the power came on.  Unfortunately, by that time the day was wasted.  I closed up shop—frustrated and feeling useless—and began to cook dinner.

That very next day, I was so far behind that I was very excited to be able to get to work.  I sat down, booted up my computer, and set out about traveling across cyberspace to two of the websites I routinely do work for.  When I got to the sites I was dismayed to see that half of the pages would load.  Okay so maybe dismayed is not quite the right word but I can’t use profanity here.  I tried everything that I knew how to do but I couldn’t get anything to work.

What did I do?  I turned to Google of course.  I submitted my webpage error code to Google and, believe it or not, only one website was returned in the search results.  The website was a posting and technical support forum in which a guy seemed to be having the same problem as I was.  He seemed to think that it happened because he installed Google’s new web browser Chrome but not a single person had responded to his post with anything useful other than a comment on his avatar.  So I spent the next three hours digging around on the Internet looking for solutions to my problem and didn’t find anything!
The next obvious step was for me to dive deep into the innards of my computer looking for ones and zeros that were out of place.  I’ve never had any trouble with my current desktop, but my previous two had given me enough grief that I had learned a few tricks.  They were fast and dirty but I was okay with that, after what my computer had put me through you’d better believe I was okay with that.

I spent most of the night fruitlessly banging away at my keyboard and shaking my head in despair.  Not even my good old friend system restore was of any use to me.  It stumbled through half of its programming and then froze before the end giving me an unspecified error.  I went to sleep and had nightmares about gremlins spilling from the disk drive in my desktop.  The dysfunction of my electronics had me so discombobulated that the next day I came home from grocery shopping trip with nothing but a six-pack of beer and Fritos.

I was about to give up, indeed I went so far as to price and new computers on a big-box store’s website but decided a new box was out of my price range at the moment what with Christmas so near and all.  So I sat down with grim determination and rebooted my computer in safe mode once again.  I crossed my fingers, whispering prayers under my breath, and ran system restore one last time.  I don’t claim to know what goes on inside these little metal boxes that we set on our desks and sit and worship for hours on end but clearly there’s a little deviltry inside them all because when I my computer started this last time everything was back to normal!  Internet Explorer started right up, and the World Wide Web was once again at my fingertips.

Now I don’t know if I believe in karma or not, it’s just too soon for me to tell, but this last week has almost made a believer out of me.  You see, just few days before this all happened I had been griping to one of my friends how kids these days didn’t know what do when the power went out, how they thought it was the end of the world, and how they were often completely paralyzed by the loss of their electronic gadgets.  I realize the irony of that now and maybe I won’t be so quick to belly-ache about the younger generation in the future.  It’s not likely, but maybe.

 

Until next time, I suggest you let the Wookie win.

Websites are more work that I predicted

Well, I promised you all a website soon but it’s proving to be more work than I had expected. Every time I think I’m getting close to done, something always pops up. Oh, wouldn’t that be cool if I added a page with samples and each of those samples linked to another page? Wow, how awesome would it be to have a sign-up sheet for a monthly newsletter about freelancing, outsourcing, and writing in general? Wouldn’t it . . .
It’s a lot of work but I think I’m pretty close to actually having it finished. I just need one more page done and then I will announce it to the world! Have a friend look at it, he said he thought it needed frames, flashy graphics, and maybe some animation. Not really sure about that. I don’t want to overwhelm any of my visitors—especially since I’m gearing the site toward local people.
So I’ll keep you all updated and hopefully have something for you all to look at!
Stay tuned.

Long Time No Html

I’ve decided to get serious about my online writing career and to that end have purchased a domain name.  I’m also in the process of constructing my own website.  I’m not doing it all myself because i think nobody could do a better job, I’m doing it just because I’m cheap and don’t want to spend the dough to have somebody else do the work for me.

I had a website back in the day when Geocities was just Geocities and you didn’t have to worry about style sheets and all of that hooey.  you just needed to know html and I did.  Well sort of.  I got a few of the basics down and made a page that, while a complete eyesore, was better than any of the templates I’ve seen for Microsoft Publisher.

I ended up scrounging for a copy of Dreamweaver and now I’m trying to relearn everything I’ve forgotten and learn all of the new stuff that didn’t exist back when “Real life X-files” (my former page-I was only 13 okay?) was live on the interwebs.

I will keep blogging about this endeavor and hopefully I will have some good news shortly–like the launch of my new site.

 

until then, keep it real–no, really.

-RP